The semiconductor integrated circuit industry has experienced rapid growth in the past several decades. Technological advances in semiconductor materials and design have produced increasingly smaller and more complex circuits. These material and design advances have been made possible as the technologies related to processing and manufacturing have also undergone technical advances. In the course of semiconductor evolution, the number of interconnected devices per unit of area has increased as the size of the smallest component that can be reliably created has decreased.
Many of the technological advances in semiconductors have occurred in the field of memory devices, especially non-volatile memory devices. A variety of structures and configurations have been developed to scale up a memory density in the non-volatile memory device such as for example, programmable-read-only memory (PROM), erasable-programmable-read-only memory (EPROM), and electrically-erasable-programmable-read-only memory (EEPROM). One of the dielectric structures used in fabricating an EEPROM device is referred to as an oxide-nitride-oxide (ONO) structure. Quality of the ONO structure plays a crucial role in terms of determining the performance of a memory device. Thus, a memory device that has improved qualities of an ONO structure (e.g., non-contaminated ONO structure) is needed.
The various features disclosed in the drawings briefly described above will become more apparent to one of skill in the art upon reading the detailed description below. Where features depicted in the various figures are common between two or more figures, the same identifying numerals have been used for clarity of description.